Bowels Quotes

For a brief moment I thought that Stanley the Magical Squirrel had been alive up until only seconds before, when my father had chosen to give him some sort of bizarre colorectal exam gone horribly wrong. Then I realized that this was, more likely, a squirrel my father had found dead on the road, and that he had sliced it open and decided to use it as some sort of grotesque hand puppet culled from the very bowels of hell. Lisa ~ Jenny Lawson

blackballed from guild roles for two generations, because apparently mutiny is in the DNA, like eye color or a tendency toward irritable bowels. On ~ John Scalzi

The best cure for cranial constipation is emotional fiber. Feel 'something', anything.
Pain, anger, joy; if your heart goes eerily cold or leaps erratically from your chest, your synaptic bowels will soon find release. ~ Muse

Agnes shut her eyes, clenched her fists, opened her mouth and screamed.

It started low. Plaster dust drifted down from the ceiling. The prisms on the chandelier chimed gently as they shook.
It rose, passing quickly through the mysterious pitch at fourteen cycles per second where the human spirit begins to feel distinctly uncomfortable about the universe and the place in it of the bowels. Small items around the Opera House vibrated off shelves and smashed on the floor.

The note climbed, rang like a bell, climbed again. In the Pit, all the violin strings snapped, one by one.
As the tone rose, the crystal prisms shook in the chandelier. In the bar, champagne corks fired a salvo. Ice jingled and shattered in its bucket. A line of wine-glasses joined in the chorus, blurred around the rims, and then exploded like hazardous thistledown with attitude.

There were harmonics and echoes that caused strange effects. In the dressing-rooms the No. 3 greasepaint melted. Mirrors cracked, filling the ballet school with a million fractured images.
Dust rose, insects fell. In the stones of the Opera House tiny particles of quartz danced briefly...

Then there was silence, broken by the occasional thud and tinkle.
Nanny grinned.
'Ah,' she said, 'now the opera's over. ~ Terry Pratchett

We hated the cruise. Our cabin was deep in the bowels of the ship, the nautical equivalent of nosebleed seats. ~ Janet Ambrosi Wertman

Do people always act this way around you? (Kiara)
You should have seen the reactions when I wore a League uniform. Those were actually comical. Except for the ones who lost control of their bowels. Then it was just messy. (Nykyrian) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

He knew that if Michelle entered into the walls of the Vatican, she'd corrupt every single clergyman within, causing them to forsake their vows in trade for a few moments with her. With one glance men would happily follow her to the bowels of hell and swim across the lake of fire to get to her. ~ Travis Luedke

The first peaches of spring - the first peaches! Buy, eat, purge your bowels of the poisons of winter! ~ Pearl S. Buck

We, the survivors of the crossing, clung to the beast that had stolen us away. Not a soul among us had wanted to baord that ship, but once out on open waters, we held on for dear life. The ship became an extension of our own rotting bodies. Those who were cut from the heaving animal sank quick to their deaths, and we who remained attached wilted more slow as poison festered in our bellies and bowels. We stayed with the beast until new lands met our feet, and we stumbled down the long plants just before the poison became fatal. Perhaps here in this new land, we would keep living. ~ Lawrence Hill

Currently where you are is on a huge globe with a relatively thin crust of stone, containing fire in its bowels, rotating on its own slightly tilted axis at 1,000 miles per hour in an easterly direction while simultaneously traveling in orbit around an enormous ball of burning hydrogen, 93,000,000 miles away at 66,000 miles per hour. That's 66,000 miles per hour, or nineteen miles per second, which is much faster that you've maybe ever imagined, and means that you will be traveling nearly 60,000,000 miles this coming year.
Beauty is, you don't have to imagine it, you can feel it instead. And if you want to know what it's like, simply stop. Be still, and in that stillness, whatever you are feeling in your belly: that's it. this is what it feels like to go 66,000 miles per hour while spinning at one thousand. ~ Stephen Russell

Corporations are may lesser commonwealths in the bowels of a greater, like worms in the entrails of a natural man. ~ Thomas Hobbes

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross a ~ Imperial War Museum

In my aircar," said the old man, motioning Arthur to get into the craft which had settled silently next to them. "We are going deep into the bowels of the planet where even now our race is being revived from its five-million-year slumber. ~ Douglas Adams

Child, if such folks awe you, then picture them on the lavatory, straining, constipated. They will at once seem small, pathetic, manageable." And she whispered to me a great, universal truth: "THE BOWELS ARE GREAT LEVELLERS. ~ Angela Carter

I believe that much of the secret of soul-winning lies in having bowels of compassion, in having spirits that can be touched with the feeling of human infirmities. ~ Charles Spurgeon

Which do you think, Commendatore? Bowels in or out? ~ Thomas Harris

I love entering the bowels of the cinema and immersing myself in another world. ~ Alison Goldfrapp

Just take it from me," Donovan said. "Stay well clear of the warden. Some here think he's the devil. I don't, I don't believe in that religious talk, but I know evil when I see it. He's something rotten they dragged from the bowels of the earth, something they patched together from darkness and filth. He'll be the death of us all, every single one of us here in Furnace. Only question is when."
"I know one thing," I added. "The warden certainly brings out peoples dramatic sides."
Zee and Donovan both laughed through their noses. ~ Alexander Gordon Smith

I may not be funny. I may not be a singer. I may not be a damn seamstress. I may have diabetes. I may have really bad vision. I may have one leg. I may not know how to read. I may not know who the vice president is. I may technically be an alien of the state. I may have a Zune. I may not know Excel. I may be two 9 year olds in a trench coat. I may not have full control of my bowels. I may drive a '94 Honda Civic. I may not "get" cameras. I may dye my hair with Hydrogen Peroxide. I may be afraid of trees. I may be on fire right now. But I'm a fierce queen. ~ Justin Johnson

Poem from Rev. Jim Cotter, as listed on the opening pages of "Anatomy of the Spirit" by Caroline Myss:

~ God be in my head and in my understanding.

God be in my eyes and in my looking.

God be in my mouth and in my speaking.

God be in my tongue and in my tasting.

God be in my lips and in my greeting.

~ God be in my nose and in my smelling/inhaling.

God be in my ears and in my hearing.

God be in my neck and in my humbling.

God be in my shoulders and in my bearing.

God be in my back and in my standing.

~ God be in my arms and in my reaching/receiving.

God be in my hands and in my working.

God be in my legs and in my walking.

God be in my feet and in my grounding.

God be in my knees and in my relating.

~ God be in my gut and in my feeling.

God be in my bowels and in my forgiving.

God be in my loins and in my swiving.

God be in my lungs and in my breathing.

God be in my heart and in my loving.

~ God be in my skin and in my touching.

God be in my flesh and in my paining/pining.

God be in my blood and in my living.

God be in my bones and in my dying.

God be at my end and at my reviving. ~ Caroline Myss

The jackal rips out the hare's bowels, but the world rolls on. ~ J.M. Coetzee

With cities, as with people, Mister Vandemar," said Mr. Croup, fastidiously, "the condition of the bowels is all-important. ~ Neil Gaiman

While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees the darkly meated heart pumped of who's will and the blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue convolutions of who's will and the stout thighbones and knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers that drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their articulations of who's will all sheathed and muffled in the flesh and the hooves that stove wells in the morning groundmist and the head turning side to side and the great slavering keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes of his eyes where the world burned. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Diamonds are found only in the dark bowels of the earth; truths are found only in the depths of thought. It seemed to him that after descending into those depths after long groping in the blackest of this darkness, he had at last found one of these diamonds, one of these truths, and that he held it in his hand; and it blinded him to look at it. (pg. 231) ~ Victor Hugo

As Val jumped down onto the litter-strewn concrete after them, she thought how insane it was to follow two people she didn't know into the bowels of the subway, but instead of being afraid, she felt glad. She would make all her own decisions now, even if they were ruinous ones. It was the same pleasurable feeling as tearing a piece of paper into tiny, tiny pieces. ~ Holly Black

The Mackenzie had never met folk so poor in story and song and legends, and it moved him to a pity that pricked at his eyes. Without that tapestry of colour and words and ritual, what was life but eating and mating, sleeping and moving your bowels? All of them good and necessary, but not enough; and they themselves needed that framework too, to give them meaning. ~ S.M. Stirling

Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected. Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth. ~ Virginia Woolf

But guilt is a ghost that takes the shape of the body it inhabits and consumes all that is tender within its shell: brain, bowels, and heart. ~ Kathleen Kent

And behold, he shall be born of Mary, at Jerusalem which is the land of our forefathers, she being a virgin, a precious and chosen vessel, who shall be overshadowed and conceive by the power of the Holy Ghost, and bring forth a son, yea, even the Son of God.
And he shall go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind; and this that the word might be fulfilled which saith he will take upon him the pains and the sicknesses of his people.
And he will take upon him death, that he may loose the bands of death which bind his people; and he will take upon him their infirmities, that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.' -Alma the Younger (Alme 7:10-12) ~ Joseph Smith Jr.

The humorist who invented trial by jury played a colossal practical joke upon the world, but since we have the system we ought to try and respect it. A thing which is not thoroughly easy to do, when we reflect that by command of the law a criminal juror must be an intellectual vacuum, attached to a melting heart and perfectly macaronian bowels of compassion. ~ Mark Twain

We must with boldness and reverence challenge the covenant of grace; for this is the covenant that God hath made with us, to give us tender hearts, hearts of flesh, as Ezek. xi. 19, 'I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within their bowels; I will take away the stony hearts out of their bodies, and I will give them a heart of flesh. Now seeing this is a covenant God hath made, to give as fleshly hearts and to take away our stony, let us challenge him with his promise, and go to him by prayer. Entreat him to give thee a fleshly heart; go to him, wait his time, for that is the best time. Therefore wait though he do not hear at first. These are the means to bring tenderness of heart. Now, ~ Richard Sibbes

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken. ~ Oliver Cromwell

I will remark, here, that James W. Paige, the little bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed inventor of the machine, is a most extraordinary compound of business thrift and commercial insanity; of cold calculation and jejune sentimentality; of veracity and falsehood; of fidelity and treachery; of nobility and baseness; of pluck and cowardice; of wasteful liberality and pitiful stinginess; of solid sense and weltering moonshine; of towering genius and trivial ambitions; of merciful bowels and a petrified heart; of colossal vanity and - But there the opposites stop. His vanity stands alone, sky-piercing, as sharp of outline as an Egyptian monolith. It is the only unpleasant feature in him that is not modified, softened, compensated by some converse characteristic. ~ Mark Twain

Put your vocabulary on the top shelf of your toolbox, and don't make any conscious effort to improve it... One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your shot ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of pre-meditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed. Make yourself a solemn promise right now that you'll never use 'emolument' when you mean 'tip' and you'll never say 'John stopped long enough to perform an act of excretion' when you mean 'John stopped long enough to take a shit'. If you believe 'take a shit' would be considered offensive or inappropriate by your audience, feel free to say 'John stopped long enough to move his bowels'... ~ Stephen King

Advisory: If your husband catches an ebolavirus, give him food and water and love and maybe prayers but keep your distance, wait patiently, hope for the best-- and, if he dies, don't clean out his bowels by hand. Better to step back, blow a kiss, and burn the hut. ~ David Quammen

But when did this anger take root? When snakes first appeared on the national scene? When water in the bowels of the earth turned bitter? Or when he visited America and failed to land an interview with Global Network News on its famous program Meet the Global Mighty? It is said that when he was told that he could not be granted even a minute on the air, he could hardly believe his ears or even understand what they were talking about, knowing that in his country he was always on TV; his every moment - eating, shitting, sneezing, or blowing his nose - captured on camera. ~ Ngugi Wa Thiongo

This time I saw. In a blue heaven was coiled an infinite snake of gold and green, with four eyes of fire, black fire and red, that darted rays in every direction; held within its coils was a great multitude of laughing children. And even as I looked, all this was blotted out. Crawling rivers of blood spread over the heaven, of blood purulent with nameless forms - mangy dogs with their bowels dragging behind them; creatures half elephant, half beetle; things that were but a ghastly bloodshot eye, set about with leathery tentacles; women whose skins heaved and bubbled like boiling sulphur, giving off clouds that condensed into a thousand other shapes, more hideous than their mother; these were the least of the denizens of these hateful rivers. ~ Aleister Crowley

If the last few weeks had taught Han anything, it was that he didn't belong in the civilised part of her world. His place was in the bowels of the Falcon, or the pilot's seat. ~ James S.A. Corey

Don't Read Weight-Loss Books: Eat Them. They're a better source of fiber than information on permanent weight loss. If you eat them, they'll stay with you longer and be generally better for your bowels than the plans they offer. Ditch Your Diet. Research shows that no diet works for long, and constantly trying and failing at dieting is depressing, unhealthy, and ends up making you even fatter. Use the SWELMM system of Stop Worrying, Eat Less, Move More. ~ Paul Pearsall

Atten. Pray of what disease did Mr. Badman die, for now I perceive we are come up to his death? Wise. I cannot so properly say that he died of one disease, for there were many that had consented, and laid their heads together to bring him to his end. He was dropsical, he was consumptive, he was surfeited, was gouty, and, as some say, he had a tang of the pox in his bowels. Yet the captain of all these men of death that came against him to take him away, was the consumption, for it was that that brought him down to the grave. ~ John Bunyan

If Mary's blood is Spanish, at least it is royal. And at least she can walk straight and has control of her bowels. ~ Hilary Mantel

This clockwork twin of mine halted before me, her bowels churning out a settecento minuet, and offered me the bold carnation of her smile. Click, click
she raises her arm and busily dusts my cheeks with pink, powdered chalk that makes me cough; then thrusts towards me her little mirror. ~ Angela Carter

Now we can understand the meaning of Tereza's secret vice, her long looks and frequent glances in the mirror. It was a battle with her mother. It was a longing to be a body unlike other bodies, to find that the surface of her face reflected the crew of the soul charging up from below. It was not an easy task: her soul – her sad, timid, self-effacing soul – lay concealed in the depths of her bowels and was ashamed to show itself. ~ Milan Kundera

Kugel had discovered of late that he was gluten intolerant ... It was difficult to avoid wheat, and gluten-free food was terribly expensive, but Kugel now thought it wonderfully appropriate that matzoh - the most hated food of his youth - was the one he, as an adult, would find he was allergic to, the one that his body was actually incapable of processing, the one that the lining of his gut identified as poison.
His stomach was anti-Semitic.
His bowels had assimilated.
His rectum was self-hating.
Anne Frank would be pleased.
His mother would be disappointed. ~ Shalom Auslander

bit of inaccurate information that somehow concerned crop or commodity market information or conditions. It does not matter whether you sent that message by telephone or mail or telegraph. It does not matter who you sent that letter to. It does not matter whether the information was actually false, or merely misleading. It does not matter whether your note actually had any effect on market prices anywhere, or even whether you intended for it to have that effect. The way this law was written by the morons in Congress, you are guilty of a felony if you send a postcard to your grandmother in a nursing home, trying to make her feel better by lying about how nice the weather has been in Florida, or how low the gas prices have been. And you will not find this law in Title 18 either; this one is buried in the bowels of Title 7 (sec. 13), which lists the laws supposedly regulating "Agriculture." Even ~ James Duane

Odd how many suffering members of humankind have faced eternity obsessed with their bowels, their bedsores, or the meagerness of their diets. ~ Dan Simmons

I will give you more pain than you can imagine. Your brains will leak out of your ears, and your bowels out of your ass. I will cause that to happen without leaving a mark, and every cop here will swear you died of natural causes. ~ J.D. Robb

There is no escape. You can't be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don't try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself! ~ Hermann Hesse

To call you excrement would be an insult to the product of my bowels. ~ Clive Barker

Harshaw concluded that man, a social animal, could not avoid government, any more than an individual could escape bondage to his bowels ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Then Jix locked eyes with him and said very calmly, "If you hit her, I will open my mouth wide enough to swallow you whole, force you through my bowels, then out my other end."
Avalon scowled at him. "You can't do that."
"Try me," Jix said. Avalon backed off, then angrily stormed away, and Jix winked at Jill. "One in five. ~ Neal Shusterman

But homosexuality is a combat divider, dividing one's reason to live while taking breaks on the combat field to change diapers all because their treacherous sin causes them to lose control of their bowels. ~ Gordon Klingenschmitt

Said!" Olefsky roared, causing the gron to shy and dance nervously along the path. "Said!" The Bear brought the animal to a halt, turned around. "By my heart and bowels, laddie, who wakes every morning and takes a deep breath and says to the air, 'Air, I love you.' And yet, without air in our lungs, we would be dead within moments. And who says to the water, 'I love you!' and yet without water, we die. And who says to the fire in the winter, 'I love you!' and yet without warmth, we freeze. What is this talk of 'said'? ~ Margaret Weis

She would have done anything for Gabriel, the man shh spent the night with in the woods, if he' d give her even a single indication that he wanted her. She would have descended to Hell and searched for him, looking until she found him.She would have stormed the gates and dragged him back. She would have been Sam to his Frodo and followed him into the bowels ofMount Doom. ~ Sylvain Reynard

Do you know how to unite people behind you, Child Carridin? The quickest way? No? Loose a lion - a rabid lion - in the streets. And when panic grips the people, once it has turned their bowels to water, calmly tell them you will deal with it. Then you kill it, and order them to hang the carcass up where everyone can see. Before they have time to think, you give another order, and it will be obeyed. And if you continue to give orders, they will continue to obey, for you will be the one who saved them, and who better to lead? ~ Robert Jordan

All social rules and all relations between individuals are eroded by a cash economy, avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth. ~ Karl Marx

I spat from the bowels a great bilge and burden for which daily tranquility depends. ~ Mark A. Putch

Thirty or forty years from now, the American adventures into the bowels of the Middle East will be forgotten details of a bumbling imperialism. But what...is taking place all along the line will profoundly alter the future of the United States. ~ Charles Bowden

Eyes the broad-shouldered faceless character that symbolizes Men's Room, does Sternberg, and struggles with himself. He's needed a bowel movement for hours, and since the LordAloft 7:10 lifted things have gotten critical. He tried, back at O'Hare. But he was unable to, because he was afraid to, afraid that Mark, who has the look of someone who never just has to, might enter the rest room and see Sternberg's shoes under a stall door and know that he, Sternberg, was having a bowel movement in that stall, infer that Sternberg had bowels, and thus organs, and thus a body. Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he'd be nothing more than an ism of his organs. ~ David Foster Wallace

The drive was difficult, because at this point it seemed that everyone in town but the two of us had hopped onto the buzzing shadow entity train, and were loping around town as malevolent holes in our reality, emanating an energy that made the hairs on your arm stand and your bowels vibrate. Or maybe that was just the chemistry with Carlos I was feeling. ~ Joseph Fink

Atheism is so senseless & odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that all birds beasts & men have their right side & left side alike shaped (except in their bowels) & just two eyes & no more on either side the face & just two ears on either side the head & a nose with two holes & no more between the eyes & one mouth under the nose & either two fore legs or two wings or two arms on the shoulders & two legs on the hips one on either side & no more? ~ Isaac Newton

The end of all stories, even if the writer forebears to mention it, is death, which is where time stops short. Sheherezade knew this, which is why she kept on spinning another story out of the bowels of the last one, never coming to a point where she could say: "This is the end." Because it would have been. ~ Angela Carter

Driving through the crowded city streets and gazing upon the bizarre stream of humanity had been quite an experience for the pair but walking amongst it, actually being trapped shoulder to shoulder with some of the city's freakish denizens was something entirely different.
Here the noise was amplified, loud with shouting, screaming, chattering, the sounds of traffic, the thundering of music from clubs and from hotted up car stereo systems, the wailing of sirens.
Miller felt diseased just striding amongst it, dressed in his blasphemous disguise.
Exiting the parking station was akin to being propelled into the outer rings of hell on a course which would launch he and Friar into the very bowels of the infernal pit AKA the Victory Ampitheatre where Satan's messengers would blast their horrendous music.

Sinister Cavan, coming in April in Axes of Evil ~ Jim Goforth

Cultural indigestion, I tell you, the gripe in the bowels of your spirit. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

Rotgut was, to me, just this way to get into the underground of Manhattan where you have these little pockets a villain could rise from; a rot in the bowels of Manhattan. It led to these stories that were just very creepy. ~ Ann Nocenti

Satan sent her from the bowels of hell, I should have recognized old Jezebel. ~ Alice Cooper

We sometimes think of compassion as 'kind intention.' The Gospel writers meant more than that. The word actually means, 'to have trembling bowels.' In other words, biblical compassion is such a deep degree of care that it gnaws at your gut. ~ Ben Dailey

Randall was surrounded. He was deep within the bowels of the Earth, hopelessly cut off from any help, as he stood facing a group of strange looking beings. ~ Robert Rapoza

Mephistopheles: Within the bowels of these elements,
Where we are tortured and remain forever.
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place, for where we are is hell,
And where hell is must we ever be.
And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that is not heaven. ~ Christopher Marlowe

Let us not seek our disease out of ourselves; 'tis in us, and planted in our bowels; and the mere fact that we do not perceive ourselves to be sick, renders us more hard to be cured. ~ Seneca The Younger

Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generation of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the deform'd, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.
Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur'd.
I do not press my fingers across my mouth,
I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,
Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.
I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle."
-from "Song of Myself ~ Walt Whitman

Utopias travel about underground, in the pipes. There they branch out in every direction. They sometimes meet, and fraternize there. Jean-Jacques lends his pick to Diogenes, who lends him his lantern. Sometimes they enter into combat there. Calvin seizes Socinius by the hair. But nothing arrests nor interrupts the tension of all these energies toward the goal, and the vast, simultaneous activity, which goes and comes, mounts, descends, and mounts again in these obscurities, and which immense unknown swarming slowly transforms the top and the bottom and the inside and the outside. Society hardly even suspects this digging which leaves its surface intact and changes its bowels. There are as many different subterranean stages as there are varying works, as there are extractions. What emerges from these deep excavations? The future. ~ Victor Hugo

The bowels of existence do not speak unto man, except as man. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I would like to be a figment of my own imagination, but belly and bowels will not permit. ~ Mason Cooley

If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even,- for that is the seat of sympathy,-he forthwith sets about reforming the world. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Somewhere," he told her, "somewhere else lived a boy and a girl beside the sea and as they grew older they grew more transparent. At first blue blood vessels and then bones bloomed beneath the skin but soon they could see the shapes of the world behind their bodies, the shudder of leaves like shadows in the brain, a butterfly's flutter in the mutter of the heart, beetles in the coils of the bowels. They watched wine whirl down each other's throats and the sun rise up each other's spines, stepping vertically vertebra to vertebra. Soon the only substance they obtained was when their bodies overlapped and so they clasped each other, peering for the vestiges of eyes, teeth, ears, smears against the landscape. And one day they kissed and disappeared. ~ Keith Miller

We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual. ~ John Cheever

A good reliable set of bowels is worth more to a man than any quantity of brains. ~ Josh Billings

He would be of blood to us: not only come to the sick, and to our bed-side, but would lie down and be sick, taking on him sick clay, and be, in that condition of clay, a worm and not a man, that he might pay our debts; and would borrow a man's heart and bowels to sigh for us, man's eyes to weep for us, his spouse's body, legs, and arms, to be pierced for us; our earth, our breath, our life, and soul, that he might breathe out his life for us; a man's tongue and soul to pray for us: and yet, he would remain God, that he might perfume the obedience of a High Priest with heaven, and give to justice blood that chambered in the veins and body of God, in whom God had a personal lodging. ~ Samuel Rutherford

A local phrase book, entitled Speak in Korean, has the following handy expressions. In the section 'On the Way to the Hotel': 'Let's Mutilate US Imperialism!' In the section 'Word Order': 'Yankees are wolves in human shape - Yankees / in human shape / wolves / are.' In the section 'Farewell Talk': 'The US Imperialists are the sworn enemy of the Korean people.' Not that the book is all like this - the section 'At the Hospital' has the term solsaga ('I have loose bowels'), and the section 'Our Foreign Friends Say' contains the Korean for 'President Kim Il Sung is the sun of mankind.'
I wanted a spare copy of this phrase book to give to a friend, but found it was hard to come by. Perhaps this was a sign of a new rapprochement with the United States, or perhaps it was because, on page 46, in the section on the seasons, appear the words: haemada pungnyoni dumnida ('We have a bumper harvest every year'). ~ Christopher Hitchens

All that can be cherished from this world, all that makes life worth living is that which is mined from its bowels through your own toil, fashioned from its clay by your own craft, fired in the kiln of your heart. Oh, how precious, how delightful a feast, the life that has been forged by its own master! ~ Tzvi Freeman

The superstitious belief, common to miners, that gnomes or fiends dwell within the bowels of the earth, began to seize me. I shuddered at the thought of descending further and braving the inhabitants of this nether valley. Nor indeed could I have done so without ropes, as from the spot I had reached to the bottom of the chasm the sides of the rock sank down abrupt, smooth, and sheer. I retraced my steps with some difficulty. Now I have told you all. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

If Cairnholm's only phone connected to some den of iniquity called the "piss hole," how did that bode for the rest of the island? Would my first trip to Europe be spent evading drunken maniacs and watching birds evacuate their bowels on rocky beaches? Maybe so. But if it meant that I'd finally be able to put my grandfather's mystery to rest and get on with my unextraordinary life, anything I had to endure would be worth it. ~ Ransom Riggs

Let me speak to your boss I said. Six magic words that roil deep in the bowels of anymore collecting a paycheck on a biweekly basis. It's like winking at a leprechaun: he has to give up his pot of gold, and yet no one knows why. ~ Walter Mosley

In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Living in the edge - that's what I feel like when I don't know what my bowels are going to do next. ~ Jane Wilson-Howarth

The cern paled, and all the courageous which accompanied him into the conversation was now all done away. He shrunk back, his audacity dwizzening under the teneberous gloom of the giant's long shadow. He turned to entreat the help of his fellow soldiers with desperate looks, but there was little more than half of the regiments left behind him, all of them unwilling to intervene, and his bowels rumbled, his heart sinking into the grave of conscience, and never had he felt more mistaken in his conduct. ~ Michelle Franklin

He waited for the black, terrible anger as though for some beast out of the night. But it did not come to him. His bowels seemed weighted with lead, and he walked slowly and lingered against fences and the cold, wet walls of buildings by the way. Descent into the depths until at last there was no further chasm below. He touched the solid bottom of despair and there took ease. ~ Carson McCullers

The body consists of three parts: the brainium, the borax and the abominable cavity. The brainium contains the brain. The borax contains the heart and lungs and the abominable cavity contains the bowels of which there are five: a, e, i, o, u. ~ Tom Magliozzi

Deacon flushed and smiled. "I guess you're right. I just want to feel, like ... used. I want you to fuck me like I'm ... like I'm
"
"A cheap whore?" Mark supplied. He was familiar with the feeling.
"Yes!" Deacon looked relieved. Then nervous again. "Only don't ... "
Mark wound an arm around him and kissed his cheek. "Spit it out. If I can clean my bowels out in front of you, you can tell me how you want to be fucked."
Deacon hesitated. "Just don't be mean about it, okay? I want you to be dirty but not mean. Does that make sense?"
"Completely. ~ Lisa Henry

Reminder: Dump Brains and Bowels in Hazmat Bin! ~ J.R. Rain

God have mercy on the sinner Who must write with no dinner, No gravy and no grub, No pewter and no pub, No bellyand no bowels, Only consonants and vowels. ~ John Crowe Ransom

Now that it's too late, now that I lie here dying on this bloodstained sand, I finally get it.

I understand, now.

I understand. I know what he meant. My father told me that to know
the enemy is half the battle. I know you, now. That's right.

It's you.

All of you who sit in comfort and watch me die, who see the twitch of
my bowels through my own eyes: You are my enemy.

Corpses lie scattered around me, gleanings left in a wheat field by a careless reaper. Berne's body cools beneath the bend of my back, and I can't feel him anymore. The sky darkens over my head - but no, I think that's my eyes; Pallas' light seems to have faded.

Every drop of the blood that soaks into this sand stains my hands and the hands of the monsters that put me here.

That's you, again.

It's your money that supports me, and everyone like me; it's your lust that we serve.

You could thumb your emergency cut-off, turn your eyes from the screen, walk out of the theatre, close the book . . .

But you don't.

You are my accomplice, and my destroyer.

My nemesis.

My insatiable blood-crazed god.

Ah, ahhh, Christ . . . it hurts. ~ Matthew Woodring Stover

Wilson's weakness was to be over-literal, or to assume that his opponents were. One treatise, The Uttermost Pit, demonstrated with considerable geological learning that there could not be space within the mineral bowels of the Earth for any chambers big enough to contain all the damned souls of the ages. A third, Going to Gehenna, purported to show that the biblical references to the infernal domain were in point of fact to real places of sinister repute, and not to anywhere metaphysical. Wilson lost no opportunity to argue, with any evidence he found to hand, that there could not be any hell or Hades, and so none should fear them. ~ Mark Valentine

We leave Pippa behind, standing in the dark, teeming bowels of the camp, while the sun begins to stain the sky electric, and from all sides the guns draw closer. ~ Lauren Oliver

Mammon led them on, Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell From heav'n, for ev'n in heav'n his looks and thoughts Were always downward bent, admiring more The riches of Heav'ns pavement, trod'n Gold, Then aught divine or holy else enjoy'd In vision beatific; by him first Men also, and by his suggestion taught, Ransack'd the Center, and with impious hands Rifl'd the bowels of thir mother Earth For Treasures better hid. - MILTON, Paradise Lost ~ Neal Stephenson

Actually, perhaps they're just trying to remind themselves where they are. After all, sitting there with Jeremy [Kyle] and his iridescent pupils glistening before them, confronted by a studio audience so ugly they'd make John Merrick spew down the inside of his face-bag, the poor sods could be forgiven for forgetting they were on national television and starting to believe they were somewhere in the bowels of hell instead. ~ Charlie Brooker

If she was going to live in Cow's Bowels, New York, she wanted the complete small town package. She wanted a Fourth of July parade, a country fair with an oxen pull and a pie-eating contest, and she wanted a little, homey mom-and-pop supermarket, run by Mr. Whipple himself. ~ Suzanne Brockmann

A fool more foolish than most had once jested that even Lord Tywin's shit was flecked with gold. Some said the man was still alive, deep in the bowels of Casterly Rock. ~ George R R Martin

Mom, mom, mom, mom! A yowl rose from my gut, my bowels, my womb, raw as a birth cry but with no hope in it, a maddening howl, a roar, the water a wailing wall shattering around me. Unsyllabled, thoughtless, the cry rose from the oldest cells in my body. I hadn't known grief could be so primal, so crude. The violence shook me. When it stopped, I fell to my knees in the shower, and the water called to the water in me; I wanted to melt, to run down the drain and under the city to the creek and then to the river thirty miles away. Mom, mom, mom, mom! ~ Lorna Crozier